Interesting essay at IHE, but make sure to read comments to see the divide in visceral terms.

Article: Half a century ago, C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures pointed to a growing gap between the sciences and the humanities. Despite similar levels of education and similar socioeconomic origins, he wrote, scientists and literary intellectuals “had almost ceased to communicate at all.” In Snow’s view, the different perspectives could have sparked an enormously creative conversation, but the communities were too isolated for such a conversation to take place, and members of both cultures were the poorer for it.

Many would argue that the gap between the disciplines that concerned Snow is still with us. But in higher education that gap has been supplemented by a new divide, one that is perhaps even more threatening to the future stability and prosperity of academic culture as a whole. This is the gap between the worldview of college and university faculty on the one hand and that of the information technology sector on the other.

Example comment: I've rarely seen such a load of you-know-what. The analogy is utterly bogus. The "educational technology industry" is not an intellectual "culture." It is a commercial industry. Like any industry, it will say nearly anything to sell its products. It doesn't care about student "outcomes," and even less about students, except inasmuch as these might be useful in the endless pursuit of profit. Remember cigarette companies having doctors recommend their products in advertisements? That is the more appropriate analogy. Professors are not, in the main, resistant to technology. They are resistant to expensive, cumbersome, unnecessary technology being foisted upon them for commercial rather than pedagogical reasons. Technology has always had a place in education. (Chalk is a technology. Books are a technology. Films/videos are a technology. Calculators are a technology. Word processors are a technology.) The industry that aims to exploit technology for profit knows least where that place is, but would have us believe that its place is everywhere.﻿

Seth Godin has given so much to the business community, it's really not possible to capture it all. He speaks truth in ways that help us see a blinding glimpse of the obvious in a serious, why the hell didn't I think of that sort of way.

Wow, I hadn't heard this: "As they walked, people crowded around Nabors, thanking him, photographing him and reaching out to touch him. He noticed something incongruous: A middle-aged woman was crying and trying to work her way closer to him. He reached out to comfort her.

But when she was within arm’s length of Nabors, her face suddenly contorted from sadness and tears to hatred and rage. She swung one of her hands toward his face. There were razor blades somehow attached to the end of her fingers. Nabors raised his arms to deflect the blow. The razor blades sliced into the skin of one of his arms, leaving blood streaming down it.

A marine standing next to Nabors took action. He punched the woman, eliminating the threat."﻿

Jim Nabors may have played the addle-brained, wholesome rural bumpkin Gomer Pyle in a popular military sit-com half a lifetime ago, but he is refreshingly profane when you meet him in person.
At the start of an extensive interview, it took less than two minutes for him to launch his first F-bomb. For people familiar with the golly-mouthed Gomer Pyle, it seems almost unimaginable.
Over the next hour, the 84-year-old retired actor and singer offere...

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted the same scene plays out: dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here.

Back in 2012, I first told you about the amazing youth chamber orchestra from Cateura, Paraguay. The families from this small impoverished town, located alongside a vast landfill, can't afford many luxuries -- like buying instruments for their kids.

La Grand Laveuse (“Washer Woman”) is nestled between the historic Pacific Southwest Building and Payless. Bushes disguise it from afar. Its plaque is several feet away and often walked on. While it’s...